Bitcoin mining would always have an energy footprint (as a whole) would be equal to bitcoin's price vs electricity costs.

If you make a miner to be twice as efficient as a prior one (I. E. Use half the energy for the same hashrate), " people" (companies at this point) would buy twice the amount of it.

In fact there is one and only way to make mining efficient in energy needs. That would be if it uses energy that would otherwise be consumed for something else. Say instead of ads, websites of the future making a profit off of mining a coin.

Any other way and mining is inefficient as heck. By design in fact. So yeah, Intel may be able to build an energy efficient miner but it would help none towards "energy efficient mining" as the article suggests. If anything "energy efficient miners" are more wasteful to actual mining, because you now have two miners in place of one, using (pretty much) the same energy as before, but using twice the material.

The article never says anything about what you're rambling about. As much as people hate coindesk there is nothing wrong with the article. The only thing wrong is your assumption. From the perspective of manufacturers Intel just patented a very efficient design for hashing Bitcoin. This means Intel will have every miner buying from them as long as it remains the most efficient product.

It's not an assumption. It is the title. Coindesk is wrong. This will not cause energy efficient mining. It will cause a less energy efficient mining environment through the introduction of an energy efficient miner.
That should be more careful with their assumptions (which exist right there in the title). People may think that mining is getting more efficient, whilst actually is getting more inefficient as time goes by.
Re-read my post, it is a timely comment given the energy concerns major publication have about bitcoin energy consumption.

Miners solve hashes. New chip design makes solving hashes more efficient. Hence mining is more efficient. No one said the power to mine 1 Bitcoin will decrease. Difficultly adjustment is something else.

No. Mining is more inefficient because you will now use two miners in place of one. So same energy consumption, but twice the material expenditure.
I think you have to read up my "rambling response" after all. I explain it there beautifully. That post was made *exactly* for people like you that don't get the incentive structure of bitcoin (it inverts the effect of what happens in individual cases... when talking of the whole network).

More energy efficient miner would be able to sustain a higher global hashrate, which is a good thing for the blockchain.
But yes, there will always be a tug of war between coin price, local electricity cost, miner's J/TH, miner's price & availability.
No matter Intels' intentions, we *desperately* need real competition on mining hardware.

No doubt. I was mostly commenting on the title. Intel is not seeking energy efficient mining, but largely an energy efficient *miner*. An energy efficient miner does not lead to energy efficient mining due to the incentive structure that is inherent to bitcoin mining.

That's right but it would help return to more decentralized mining, assuming they sell the chips to everyone and not just some select group. The energy efficiency is purely a competitive advantage for Intel. It would be a weak product if it was less efficient as they would have to sell it for a lot less to compensate (probably too cheap to be profitable). If anyone can push miner efficiency to it's limit surely Intel can. Bitcoin is best served by commodity chips much like DRAM chips so any of a thousand small companies can make miners.

Obviously a commodity chip would help to decentralization much better than simply building a more efficient miner. But for that you'd need to build some kind of adaptive PoW and I doubt that bitcoin is forking anytime soon to allow for that. But in the long term, yeah, they definitely need to do that.
As for Intel helping decentralization (by building its own miner). Yeah, in the short term. However if her miner is *too* efficient it will help take over the market and the monopoly would merely swing back. So long term that is not a very sustainable model (obviously the others would try to one up Intel. However Intel has probably the best foundries in the world a d thus win the war eventually... If she survives that long in fact. Getting us back to a monopolistic situation)

Mining is a competition. The money that is spent on it is determined by whoever has the deepest pockets at any one time, not by hashing efficiency or electricity cost.
It would be good for bitcoin if intel produce a very efficient miner because that makes mining rigs more of a common commodity.

You cannot increase the price of electricity. It only goes down long term. People extract more and more energy from the planet in more and more ways.
See the sudden explosion in shale production, or the constant lowering of the price of solar/wind.
Again, the only way to decrease energy footprint for mining is if it also does something else as well (say provide revenue for website/app owners through the use of their users' resources).

A good way to make it more efficient would be to design a miner that outputs a high heat per unit area so that it could be useful for heating water. However, that would require a technology that can itself withstand high heat and silicon (afaik) can't reach 100C and still function effectively. People have hot water tanks (except much of asia/europer where they are more efficient with point of use heaters) with resistive elements that could be replaced by miner bars. It would be strange to see steam powered devices that boil water with miners but it would actually put that energy to work.

Yeah being used as heaters too.
Basically reusing their energy in other things. Still I'd love if websites were to replace advertising with mining. It can be adjusted to be good to battery life and finally have those pesky ads go the way of the dodo. The ads based revenue stream causes all kinds of illegal behavior (loss of privacy above all).

So you're thinking web users might have a miner device (or chip inside) and whenever they are on some site it directs work at the pool url provided (by the site) in lieu of adverts. Sites would still need to work for users without these and so fallback on adverts probably, or btc in a LN channel. I'm sure there would still be abuses though as people always find ways.

If you mine a form of adaptive pow (constantly changing the nature of the puzzle, albeit slightly each time), then you don't need a special hardware. In fact the chip on your phone (and the phones of 5billion people's) is uniquely and efficiently adapted to this exact type of work.
Point is that ads won't be needed to have a site survive, merely computing power. So if your website is popular enough it would be enough to sustain and probably expand it. Sure ads would still exist, but they won't need to be ultra efficient (I.e. stealing people's privacy) and in so far that they are people would be able to choose an alternative that does not include them. At this point in history they can't because the ad revenue model is by far the most dominant on the web. The subscription model doesn't do too well. Adding a 3rd more capable player in the race would both make mining more efficient and allow for a more humane web.
That and space heaters are IMO the two best uses for minining hardware that wants to remain efficient. I.e. reuse their energy for in secondary ways besides mining.

AMD have GPUs capable of mining, but not ASIC based miners, right? Intel is making ASICs according to the article, and energy efficient ones at that, which are the real game changer; Samsung and NGO are already onboard making 10/7nm ASICs respectively, so why would Intel not do the same?
The price may not be indicative of where we are progress wise, but 2018 is shaping out rather nicely ecosystem wise with this news; as well as LN support coming on strong lately and with Wasabi and Samourai building privacy based solutions. And hopefully with the death of Bitmain/Bcash we can wrap this year on a high.
&#x200B;
Fuck the ETF that I wish never comes, this is what we want from Institutions: R&D. I personally cannot grasp why anyone would want these mega corps to do anything else. Given how things are shaping out from these big Hardware corps, I'd go so far as to say that a cash heavy Apple must be considering getting involved now that so many hardware firms (especially since its biggest Mobile rival entered) have made their intentions clear and Apple pay was a total flop traction wise.